Correspondence

...When military conflicts are framed in theology, the fight transcends worldly considerations like reason and reality, victory and defeat, or even life and death...

...As if all of this wasn't bad enough, we have an undersecretary of defense who sees direct evidence of Satan in a black smudge on a photograph, and doesn't even feel foolish saying so in public...

...The political life of man must constantly steer between the Scylla of anarchy and the Charybdis of tyranny...

...3) is fine as far as it goes, but like the Maginot line, it doesn't go far enough...

...In a religious war, retreat is heresy, death takes the color of martyrdom, and innocent civilians are rendered expendable in light of the eternal stakes of holy conflict...

...Boykin's subsequent apologies cannot conceal the clarity of his original statements...

...Rather, it is an unalienable right among the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...

...In contrast, the reason theocracies like Iran and the Taliban's Afghanistan are "failed states" is their rigid, medieval religious rule...

...In fact, he commands the 4th Infantry Division...

...First, it is one thing for a pundit to say the United States is a "Christian country...

...DAVID BLUM Bakersfield, CA JUST DO IT CHRISTOPHER LYNCH's essay on justwar theory is helpful, and I share his enthusiasm for recovery of just-war theory in the larger culture ("Making War," Nov...

...No doubt Boykin has served his country with distinction these many years, but he is not irreplaceable...

...The United States is a prosperous and thriving country because we emerged from the Enlightenment with a democracy that protects the religious rights of believers and nonbelievers...

...He is not worthy of a defense by Gelernter or any other thoughtful person, and should be fired immediately and very publicly...

...Lest hope be raised regarding the sanctity of human life, the Pennsylvania house bill applies only to pets...

...It must be made at every opportunity in a society whose members seem increasingly unaware of the nature of their rights, and even, possibly, of the nature of their humanity...

...His intemperate statements are no doubt being circulated by militant Islamists as evidence that shameless terrorism is actually part of a religious war...

...It's frightening that this needs explaining...

...It is quite another for a highranking general to assert it, in uniform, in a church, on video...

...That the majority of the nation is Christian, thus making Christianity the official faith of the land...

...Robert Louis Dabney (Union Seminary in Virginia) and B.B...

...But what does that mean...

...ROBERT MEYER New York, NY ANIMAL KINGDOM THE WEEKLY STANDARD's coverage of the Terri Schiavo case is important and on target (THE SCRAPBOOK, Nov...

...STEVEN WILLIS Cincinnati, OH BALANCING ACT GERARD ALEXANDER's defense against Bush's foreign policy critics ("An Unbalanced Critique of Bush," Nov...

...Boykin should be made to resign because his statements, made in uniform, undermine America's insistence that the war on terror is absolutely not a war on Islam...

...AVI MATALON Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies Harvard University Cambridge, MA I AGREED with much of David Gelernter's "Onward, Christian Soldier...

...One of the most articulate Protestant voices, Reinhold Niebuhr (Union Seminary, New York), could draw upon just-war theory during WWII and in resistance to communism...

...It is because men are sinners that justice can be achieved only by a certain degree of coercion on the one hand, and by resistance to coercion and tyranny on the other hand...

...They fight to defend the Constitution...

...Our right to exercise our religious beliefs is not conferred by the Constitution...

...A war on terrorists must be fought and can be won...

...Boykin, now undersecretary of defense, has thereby undermined the administration's stated policy and unwittingly strengthened the enemy's call for jihad...

...The Constitution was adopted to recognize and to protect that right, among others, from the incursions of government...

...This bill makes it an offense to deny "necessary sustenance, drink, shelter" to those over whom one has "duty of care...

...Gelernter should know that pluralism is America's greatest strength, not sectarianism...

...The substantive critique of Bush's unilateral foreign policy is not that the United States is creating new enemies in (continental) Europe, as Alexander claims, but that we are failing to enlist our friends in a battle against the enemies we already have...

...Imagine, to use an ironic historical analogy, if the French and Americans had so disliked each other that the United States had refused to enter the war against Germany...

...While the Florida legislature's passage of "Terri's Law" opens the possibility for state intervention to ensure "nutrition and hydration" under limited circumstances, it does not go as far as the Pennsylvania house bill 840 of this year...

...Al Qaeda and other militant Islamists would like nothing better than to spark a war of religion and have purposefully framed their terrorism in religious terms...

...a war on Islam should not be fought and cannot be won, not least because America (unlike al Qaeda) is not in the business of relentless and endless religious crusades...

...As he wrote, "Pacifists do not know human nature well enough to be concerned about the contradictions between the law of love and the sin of man...

...the other could be construed by those not given to Gelernter's brand of thoughtful distinction (which might fairly describe much of the Muslim masses to whom we wish to appeal) to be something like official policy...

...he was obviously not disparaging merely the "false god" of riches (how rich is even the richest Somali warlord...

...John Witherspoon, president of the College of New Jersey, Presbyterian pastor, and the only clerical signer of the Declaration of Independence, was familiar with this tradition...

...With a single statement, he has probably undone years of pleading by Bush and others that this is not a war against Islam...

...That's precisely why we have the Bill of Rights—to prevent majoritarian tyranny...

...David Curtin San Angelo, TX HISTORY TEACHES that wars of religion cannot be won...

...MEL KULBICKI York College of Pennsylvania York, PA IRAQ FLAK A Black Hawk helicopter that crashed in Tikrit two weeks ago did not, in fact, come under RPG fire only after it hit the ground, as Stephen F. Hayes reported in "Under Fire in Baghdad" (Nov...

...Religious wars, like the medieval Crusades or the Reformation conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, can last for centuries and end only in exhaustion rather than solution...

...In responding to the attacks of September 11, 2001, the president has been careful to separate the war on terror from any suggestion of a war on Islam...

...CENTCOM has since confirmed that an RPG brought down the chopper, as CNN first reported...

...Or more precisely, it misses the attack entirely...

...It is unacceptable for an undersecretary of defense to contradict the president and strengthen the enemy by promoting a personally inspired war of religion...

...But the distinction between who confers what rights on men and how those rights are protected is a crucial one...

...but disagreed strongly with this sentence: "The Constitution confers on Jews and Christians equally the right to behave as if they believed in Judaism and Christianity respectively...

...If this is the kind of person we have overseeing the vanguard of the war on terror, we have reason to be very afraid...

...It was also reported in "Under Fire in Baghdad" that Major General Raymond Odierno commands the 4th Armored division...

...Yet interest in just-war theory is not as new a phenomenon as he indicates, and not unique to the progeny of Aquinas...

...William Boykin has fallen into the al Qaeda trap by publicly disparaging all of Islam and framing America's fight as a religious conflict...

...It is also one thing to profess one's Christian faith, another to disdain Islam as Boykin did, and yet another to cast the war on terror in exactly the kind of stark, religious terms that President Bush has avoided so assiduously...

...The damage done by his statements, and by his continuance in his post, has likely outweighed his contributions...

...Warfield (Princeton seminary) were well versed in Augustine and knew this tradition during the Civil War...

...CHARLES CLAUNCH Chicago, IL DAVID GELERNTER ASSERTS, rather blithely, that America is obviously a "Christian nation...

...It is a sad commentary on our times when animals are given more protection under law than humans...

...One is merely an opinion...

...Our soldiers, unlike al Qaeda's, do not fight for God or Jesus...

...By attempting to goad the United States into a declaration of crusade, militant Islamists hope to enlist the entire Islamic community to their hideous cause...

...We regret the errors...